"Rumors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godbersen Anna)

Nine

“WAS THAT FOR ME?” PENELOPE WHISPERED. SHE didn’t waste time turning toward the person for whom her question was intended. She looked instead across the opera house at Henry, who had just called out a hello loud enough for all the people in private boxes to hear. He’d slumped back into his chair now and, as his gaze was focused on the arms he’d folded across his chest, there was no way to determine whom he’d meant to address.

“Perhaps,” Buck answered. He was sitting in the seat just behind Penelope, to the right of her grandfather Ogden, who could no longer hear well enough to appreciate the music, but whose eyesight was sharp enough — when he wasn’t drowsing — to comment authoritatively on all the best bosoms in the house. He had never bothered learning the table manners of the Manhattan upper class, despite his lifelong effort to join it, but he had seen that the fault was corrected in his son. Richmond Hayes, Penelope’s father, had been a quick study in business as well as personal comportment, which was why he stayed in the inner box at the opera — or better yet, in the gentlemen’s smoking room — and kept his eyes to himself.

“No, it wasn’t — you’re a horrid yes-man,” Penelope lashed back affectionately. “He’s just giving everyone something to talk about.”

“Is that what you children call it these days?” said Mrs. Hayes, who sat beside her daughter along the rail. For a moment Penelope just looked at her mother in surprise — she was usually too concerned with what other people were doing to listen in on her daughter’s conversations — but then the older woman’s opera glasses were back to her busy little eyes, and she was again looking for some glimmer of scandal out in the audience. Penelope reflected for a moment on the unfortunate number of chins possessed by her mother, on the lackluster quality of her hair that was the result of many years of dyeing it, and on the garish appearance of her too-made-up face.

“Giving all of them something to talk about, I should say.” Penelope lowered her eyes and tried to force a blush. Her skin had the sheen of china naturally, and embarrassment was not a feeling easily induced in her, but after a few moments she managed something like a petal shade to rise in her sharp cheekbones — not much, but enough, so that if the right matron were looking through her eyeglasses at just that moment, she’d see how ashamed young Miss Hayes was of her grotesque mother. Or the right gossip columnist, for that matter. Then she twisted around and directed her words into her fan. “Buck, could you do me an itty-bitty favor?”

“But of course.”

She had written the note hours ago — in fact, she had written it four times, trying to make sure that the paper looked casually ripped enough, that her penmanship was clear enough not to be misunderstood while still suggesting spontaneity. As she had pressed her pen down to produce each letter of those nine little words, she had thought of him. Now she palmed it, and reached behind her to take Buck’s hand in hers.

“Please take this to Box 23,” she whispered.

Buck inclined his head gently and rose up behind her. Just before he blocked her view of the doings in the inner box, she saw a young man in a black jacket and wing collar enter. She knew it was Henry, come to save her the trouble of sending Buck around with notes, and the skin of her shoulders tingled. But then a second passed and she saw clearly that the features above the little white bow tie belonged — horribly — to Amos Vreewold.

“Mr. Vreewold,” Buck was saying. “I have a few visits I have to make. Please take my seat and keep Miss Hayes company.”

Amos shook Buck’s hand, and then refocused his slightly downturned eyes on Penelope. He was tall and possessed of a prominent nose that swelled at the center. His dark hair never seemed to agree on quite which direction it was going. There had been a time — a long time ago, it seemed now — when he and Penelope had occasionally disappeared behind trees at garden parties together, and so there was plenty of reason for him to be looking at her that way, as though her demure posturing were for his own particular amusement. Still, his familiarity irritated her; she extended her arm in his direction.

“Miss Hayes, it is always a pleasure,” he said, bending to kiss her hand. He sat down behind her, with a flourish of tails, in the seat where Buck had so recently been. “Mrs. Hayes, you are looking lovely this evening,” he added, though she was wearing a dress of red satin that, in her daughter’s and everybody else’s opinion, clung unflatteringly to an excess of flesh.

“Thank you, Amos,” Penelope’s mother said, without looking away from her opera-glass view. “Is that stomacher on your mother made of real diamonds?”

“Oh, yes,” he answered, managing somehow to keep his smirk brief.

Penelope pitied herself that her new persona did not allow for public rudeness to her mother and smiled dewily up at her visitor. “Mr. Vreewold, whatever brings you to our box?”

“Why, you, of course. I haven’t seen you out and looking so beautiful since the unfortunate events of October.”

“No, I suppose you haven’t.”

“You must have been very stricken — that’s what they all say.”

“Well,” Penelope turned her eyes back to the stage in a delicate, pained sweep. “I was.”

“If you are ever in need of someone to remember Elizabeth with…”

Penelope manufactured a little choking sniff. “Thank you.”

“I hear other things, as well….”

“Oh?”

Penelope managed to keep her head steady and her gaze on the stage, though she could not help a little shine coming back into her wide blue eyes.

“Yes, all the girls are talking about it. About how brokenhearted Henry is and how melancholy you are, and how it would be the perfect end in a novel if you were to end up married to him. My sister has sent me round to find out of it’s true.” He leaned forward here, and spoke the next bit into her ear. “I was hoping not.”

Penelope brought her fan up over her smile and hoped that the warm feeling of triumph that this had provoked in her was not somehow evident in her posture. “Of course not,” she replied in a lowered voice. “It is awfully inappropriate of you to talk so soon of any romance concerning Henry Schoonmaker.”

Here her mother’s small eyes shifted in her daughter’s direction, and Penelope experienced a moment of conflicting emotions. For she knew that this rumor, so satisfying to her ears, was also satisfying to her mother’s sense of social ambition, and she found herself inwardly joyful and irritated over the same tidbit.

“All right, then. We’ll talk of something else,” Amos answered mildly as he leaned back in his seat without the smallest sign of discomfort. And then he did: of hunting dogs and notched lapels, which only reminded Penelope why she had tired of him in the first place. As he droned on, as her mother winked her little eyelids mercilessly at anyone who met her stare, Penelope saw, in the far corner of her vision, that Buck had entered Box 23. She innocently raised her glasses to her face. It was the first time she had indulged the impulse all night, and it took her a few moments — in which she was terrified she’d miss everything — to find the pertinent box in the magnified view.

Then she had Henry very close indeed, framed in a black circle. She watched him greet Buck with characteristic aloofness. Her view was too narrow to know when the note exchanged hands, and Henry must have maintained a straight face as he opened it, because even when he lowered his gaze, he registered no change in expression. But she knew when he realized who its author was, because at that moment he looked up and directly at her.

Penelope let out a tiny involuntary gasp and dropped her opera glasses into her lap, which did nothing to prevent her viewing what happened next. Henry raised his hand to dismiss Buck without even looking him in the eyes and then, his gaze still focused on Penelope, he shook his head twice slowly. He might as well have ripped the little note to shreds. It felt as though he’d slapped her in the face.

“I had better be on my way…” she heard Amos say.

Though his presence had receded in her consciousness, she was deeply sorry to hear this. She felt suddenly the importance of Henry, and everybody else, seeing her receive the attentions of bachelors, especially those with old Dutch names and new industrial money. Her whole campaign to seem like a potential bride was forgotten in the wake of Henry’s snub. Now all she wanted was to seem an object of desire. But Amos was standing. He had taken her hand to kiss it good-bye.

“Thank you for visiting,” she said, fighting to maintain a quiet frailty. “What a relief to have friends like you at times like these.”

Amos winked at her, which was not the response she had intended to elicit, and then said a few words to Mrs. Hayes before absenting himself from their box. Penelope tried to lean in the opposite direction of her mother, making the most of the advantageous shadows falling across her pale, soft chest. She directed her face to one corner of the stage so that she could sneak a few looks over at the Schoonmakers.

She wanted badly to seem elegant and aloof, but there was something like a fever of urgency inside of her that she couldn’t bring down. She put one hand over the other in her lap and then reversed them. It would be forever before Buck could make his way back through the corridor and tell her exactly what had happened. But she could see for herself and she knew plenty already. Henry wasn’t understanding her plan; he was indifferent to her artful maneuvers. She rearranged her hands again and then fidgeted with the gold chain of her opera glasses until her mother told her to stop, which she did.

“It’s official. There are many fine gowns in the audience this evening, but none as fine as those seen in the Hayeses’ box,” Buck said when he eventually retook his seat. Penelope sensed that he had more compliments at the ready, but she signaled their superfluity with her hand. What did it matter anyway that she was so much lovelier than the other girls when Henry was so blind. The wretched tick of her heart was unbearably loud in her ears, but she could not fidget and she could not frown. She was realizing for the first time in her life what agony it was to experience such unquiet beneath an impeccable veneer.